Wanted:
High-fibre spring-fling, a clothes-encounter of the summery kind.

KnittyAmy recently posted about the frustration of fickle fluctuations in personal size, especially when it comes to making your own hand-knitted garments. Like the many commenters on her blog, I’ve wanted to get this issue out into the open for a long time. It’s quite a dilemma. We crave the satisfaction of a beautiful top or sweater or whatever well-fitted personally crafted item lovingly made by our own hands for ourselves. But what do you do when the only certain thing about the size you will be when the cherished item is finally a FO is that you cannot be certain?

From a desire to improve my own health and fitness and to simultaneously do some good in the world, I recently committed to walking 60km in 2 days next September in the 2007 Toronto Weekend to end Breast Cancer. It’s good to have a medium-long range goal to keep me motivated about ongoing regular physical activity, and a feat of endurance like those 60km is a pretty good one: there is no way to cram training for that kind of thing into the last couple of weeks, so I have to haul my ass off the sofa on a frequent basis starting now (or rather a couple of months ago), and this activity has been documented here semi-regularly since the winter.

I will NEVER be a sylph. It is just not in my biological destiny to become "skinny" or "thin" or "slender" or "slim"... I will probably always be somewhere in what is referred to as the plus-sizes. But even without dieting per se, as I keep adding more physical activity to my life, unless the basic laws of biology and physics change, there will be some kind of significant changes in my personal shape and size.

Well I really hate the idea of knitting up something that I love and then having to rip it out and start over, or even worse, having a steeked garment and being unable to rip it out and salvage the yarn for another size or another project. So lately I’ve been knitting several different socks, some arm-warmers, headwarmers, and a couple of scarves while the sweaters, tops, and other body-fitting garment projects were placed on temporary hiatus pending the results of my current fitness-&-health endeavours.

But it’s spring/summer-time, warm and pretty spring time, when a knitter’s thoughts turn to lovely soft cotton, silk and bamboo, in bright colours, pretty pastels or gentle neutrals, for cute little tops, tanks and Tshirts. I feel such a great urge to make up something cute and warm-weathery to wear ASAP. But wait – how can I know what size to make? How can I make it as adjustable as possible? Alas, I am bereft!

Please chime in with your thoughts. And stay tuned. This one will definitely be continued…

BTW: that's Rubens' painting of the Three Graces up there. They don't seem very concerned about their measurments. Neither should we, unless health concerns enter the picture. Put it another way: a waist is a terrible thing to mind.